Howard grew up in Port Jefferson, New York, the son of a French librarian mother and American philosopher father.
As a child, Howard spent summers in Normandy with his grandparents and is a native speaker of both English and French.
In 2016, Howard founded the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative (PJI), which brings together scholars, practitioners, and students to study the problem of mass incarceration.
Howard is the author of the forthcoming book Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
[10] In 2014, Howard began teaching a full course to inmates at Jessup as part of the JCI Scholars Program.